lThe assault on the federal State did not wait for Donald Trump’s effective return to the White House. By naming, a week after his election, the billionaire undoubtedly the most influential in the United States at the moment, his ally Elon Musk, head of Tesla, SpaceX and “dismantle the government bureaucracy”Donald Trump has already started hostilities.
They are part of a perfect republican continuity. Their motivations may have varied over the decades, but the objective remains the same: returning to a Rooseveltian political legacy, the expansion of the federal State under the double effect of the Great Depression and then the Second World War. Republicans endured it before embarking on what the Democratic Party considers a reactionary crusade.
The latter was launched just sixty years ago by conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential campaign, at the end of which he was soundly defeated by the outgoing president, Democrat Lyndon Johnson. The term “crusade” is not unjustified if we remember that the trigger for the awakening of the American right was then advocating “freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and nature’s God”.
Deregulation wave
“Those who elevate the State and devalue the citizen must ultimately see a world in which earthly power can replace divine will. Now, this nation was founded on the rejection of this notion and on the acceptance of God as the author of freedom.Barry Goldwater said in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination. He already rejected the thesis of a “moral decay” and a “drift” American.
This republican awakening then implies a double rearmament. Spiritual with the Moral Majority, an organization created in 1979 by ultraconservative pastor Jerry Falwell, breaking with the traditional separation between religion and politics. Ideological with the appearance of the right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973. It bore fruit in 1980 with the victory of Ronald Reagan, which placed the assault on the federal State at the center of its action.
“The eight scariest words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you'”assures the Republican. The spiritual dimension is giving way to economic imperatives in the context of the crisis caused by the second oil crisis. The new president claims to know how to achieve the limited federal state that has become the mantra of the right: “The government spends all the taxes it collects. If we cut taxes, we will cut spending. » Cuts in the social programs of the “Great Society”, led by Lyndon Johnson, considered ineffective, are accompanied by a wave of deregulation.
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